Healy and Stack and the late Glenn Cunningham

Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy backed winners in races for State Senate and Assembly in the 31st and 32nd districts, and for Hudson County Executive, Sheriff and County Clerk.: But his candidates in the 33rd legislative district, and for District 7 Freeholder lost.

Three Hudson County mayors won last night, one of them posthumously.

And in the minds of voters, the legacy of the late Jersey City Mayor Glenn Cunningham abides, with his wife triumphing in her district 31 State Senate contest.

As Healy and DeGise look to work with Stack, the unfortunate odd-man out is West New York Mayor (and Assemblyman) Silverio “Sal” Vega.

If the machine gets you to the dance, you’d better get your own machine up and running quickly because a politician without his own muscle is always vulnerable. Stack built up his base with constituent services and while the Hudson County Democratic Organization and Vega battered him with press conference after press conference, Stack countered with his own constituent service powwows, where poor Union City residents lined up to personally ask the mayor how they could find housing and/or jobs.

“Helping people,” is how Stack described his rejoinder to the organization’s repeated salvos.

The fact that the Stack campaign had a video of a battle-charged Vega endorsing Stack for State Senate just a few months before Vega jumped into the race “to slay the beast,” didn’t help the West New York mayor’s chances either.

So it was over early Tuesday night and no one was surprised when Stack with his jacket sleeves rolled up to his elbows on a bullhorn and his slate of candidates demolished Vega and his squad. It was Stack with 76 % of the votes to Vega’s 23 %.

But not everyone is Stack.

And while Stack’s people envisioned a “perfect storm” for the Hudson County throwback with their leader taking the 33rd and Stack-ally and Senate candidate Assemblyman Louis Manzo and his candidates upsetting the organization in the 31st, they hoped at least to be able to humble and weaken the organization’s Senate candidate in district 32 to the north, North Bergen Mayor (and State Senator) Nicholas Sacco.

But not only did Sacco win as expected, he trounced his opponent, the Stack-backed Sean Connors – 84 % to 16 %, while the organization’s team in the south led by Sandra Bolden Cunningham beat Manzo in the 31st, 55 % to 45 %.

Manzo was in a fight from the start.

That district contains big portions of Jersey City and all of Bayonne. Bayonne’s mostly white. Two districts in Jersey City are predominantly African-American, and one of them is mammoth: Ward F. Manzo’s family has a long history of good relations with Jersey City’s African-American community and Manzo himself moves easily in black voting districts. They like him. But he was up against the widow of former Jersey City Mayor Glenn Cunningham, a legend in the community as the city’s first black mayor, and as author of the second chance program, a bona fide champion not only of the poor but of society’s outcasts. He was the kind of mayor who’d get out of his car before it stopped moving if he saw a poor person on the street, so said staffers who stood back in awe of their boss.

His widow is a different personality, but she’s his widow – and the power of her name is such that she was courted by Stack and Healy before she went with the latter and the organization.

Manzo’s team figured if Bayonne’s white blue collar turnout was good, they had a desperate shot at victory – and the Cunningham Team was thinking the same thing and looking to counter.

It was late in the day Tuesday and the numbers coming in from Bayonne were picking up and the numbers in Ward F were flat, when Cunningham partisan Dominic Santana grabbed a bullhorn, and drove into the heart of Jersey City’s Ward F.

“Bayonne’s killing us!” Santana screamed. “Get out there and vote!”

His candidate was working the transportation hubs and the senior centers throughout Jersey City, and they also had the sure-to-deliver black votes candidacy of former City Councilman L. Harvey Smith, whose son Troy yesterday at the campaign’s Monticello Avenue headquarters said his father was tearing up his base neighborhoods.

Manzo’s people, watching the early returns on the south side of Jersey City, and in the headquarters of Manzo Assembly candidate Nicholas Chiaravalloti, liked the trend in Bayonne.

It also helped that County Executive Thomas DeGise was part of the Cunningham ticket, and had the strong endorsement of Chiappone’s old antagonist, Mayor Joseph Doria. Even Manzo’s people in the heat of the battle couldn’t help but say nice things about DeGise.

But finally whatever ills plagued the Cunningham ticket, the voters in Ward F and in enough of the swing districts - in Wards E and B and significantly in Jersey City's Ward A, where Cunningham unofficially did very well - said they didn’t care. The legacy of Glenn Cunningham in his hometown was bigger. She’s not talented enough to be his standard bearer – so said Sandra Cunningham’s critics. Manzo’s people tried to take the presence of a sex offender in Cunningham’s campaign and blow that up into a major scandal. In the newspapers, it was. But it wasn’t enough to break down the resolve of voters, including Blacks and Latinos, who in the words of former Jersey City School Board President Kabili Tayari, hungered for empowerment.

Not to be discounted, insiders also said in the early morning hours of Wednesday, were women voters who saw in Sandra Cunningham an opportunity to shake free of some of the macho posturing and mud wrestling typical of a Hudson County political scrap.

For his part, Healy’s been in plenty of those scraps.

The Jersey City mayor and public brainchild of the fusion ticket in the 31st that included Cunningham, going into the fight was the presumptive favorite for the position of chairman of the Hudson County Democratic Organization.

He wins, weakening his old rival Manzo.

More importantly, the mayor stands respectful of his predecessor, Glenn Cunningham, who is so loved that those who remember him would elect his widow despite what at times was a shaky public performance, and a nerve twister for her handlers.

Healy stands as the broker of the peace among disparate factions who still nursed hurts in the aftermath of Cunningham’s death.

Removed from the most brutal dog-fighting of this campaign season, he can sit down now at a table with Stack, already confident in his abilities as a conciliator.